by Tom Wood
The assassin had no such qualms. It was the second time Victor had heard her reload. He doubted the woman had brought more than three magazines. Ninety rounds was a lot of ammunition to carry just to kill one man. Would the pressure of knowing she had used up two-thirds of her ammunition coerce her into doing something rash?
It did.
She left the cover of some crates and darted closer to a wall of pipes between them. Victor squeezed off a shot, but the woman was weaving fast and slid the last few metres.
Less distance and fewer obstacles meant a better chance of a hit for both of them, but the assassin’s fully automatic capabilities gave her the advantage.
She waited until Victor appeared again and let loose with a burst that rattled the metal around him. Sparks and bullet shrapnel struck his arm and shoulder. He dropped down again, no time to target a shot without risking a skull full of lead, but he saw enough of the assassin’s position to plan his next move.
Victor shuffled along until he was at the edge of a tall pile of sacks of cement, creeping around them to come at the woman’s flank. He popped out of cover and squeezed off a couple of fast shots that missed, but gained his enemy’s attention.
She didn’t return fire now the angle was tight – eager not to waste her remaining rounds – but Victor knew the angle could be lessened by the shooter moving parallel along the wall of pipes.
He waited, picturing the assassin doing what he would do. This time when Victor edged out of cover he did so in a crouch, because the protection provided to the assassin by the pipes did not extend to her shins and feet at this end.
She realised her exposure and was moving away an instant before Victor opened fire.
He jumped up to track her, but she had already made it into cover and was turning his way. She was as good at predicting his actions as he was hers.
He had lost the element of surprise and given himself away at the same time to a better-armed opponent.
Now he was exposed and vulnerable and if he failed to out-manoeuvre her he was as good as dead because he was never going to outshoot her. He ducked back into cover and backed off. When he had moved what he judged to be far enough, he rolled on to his front and rose on to one knee, head low.
And exploded into a sprint.
Automatic gunfire echoed through the building as he dashed between pillars, metal sparking behind him, the air hot with lead as he swerved and ran, fast and unpredictable, difficult to hit, half-unseen due to the darkness, shielded by the pillars.
When he had reached the end of their line, Victor threw himself to the ground and slid on the cement for the final metres, tearing his suit, grazing his elbows and knees, but reaching a doorway and, beyond it, the city.
But he didn’t escape.
TEN
Instead, he waited a second, rose, and using the doorframe as cover, adopted a firing position. His pursuer was a phantom – blurring darkness against darkness – swift and noiseless, but was lured into believing Victor was fleeing and she was pursuing; the attacker, in control.
He shot her with his last two rounds, the bullets striking her in the chest for a double tap.
She contorted and dropped, the gun falling from her hand. It clattered on the hard floor.
He approached. Cautious, despite what had to be fatal wounds, but without delay. He wanted answers before she died. She lay on her back, her head, arms and torso still and unmoving while her legs writhed. He could hear pained breaths that were machine-gun rapid. Her right hand was pressed over the twin holes in her chest.
‘Who are you working for?’
She didn’t answer. She groaned and tried to angle her head to see him. He saw the tears glistening in her eyes. The bone structure of her face was prominent – defined jawline and cheekbones – without looking unhealthy. He wasn’t sure of her ethnicity from appearances alone. Her skin was only a little darker than his, and he was pale, but he detected a hint of Persian in her facial features: arching eyebrows, full lips and large eyes. Those eyes were as dark as his, and her hair even darker.
‘Caglayan?’ he asked. ‘The prince?’
She had an athlete’s body, slim but strong. She had been raised well. The good nutrition showed in her height and shoulders.
Victor said, ‘If you don’t tell me, I’ll make the pain worse.’
She didn’t speak. Her rapid breathing grew louder as he neared.
‘A lot worse,’ he added. ‘At this moment you might think that’s impossible, but you should believe me when I say there can always be more. If you tell me everything I want to know then instead I can make it all go away. No more pain. No more suffering.’
‘Okay,’ she spat between breaths and he stopped. ‘I’ll tell you.’
‘I’m waiting.’
‘Please,’ she said, ‘I’m just a shooter.’
‘Trust me when I say that you don’t want me to become impatient.’
Victor took another step, now close enough to see there was no blood seeping out between the fingers of her right hand.
He couldn’t see the other hand.
He was moving before that hand snapped up, the dim light catching the hard lines of a small backup pistol.
She shot at him as he ran, the barks of each unsuppressed shot loud and echoing, the muzzle flashes illuminating his surroundings in a strobe of bright yellow light.
He made it into cover and the shooting stopped. He heard her climb to her feet, now recovered from the winding impact of blunt force trauma caused by his two bullets striking an armoured vest.
It had been a stupid mistake to have fallen for the same trick he had used on her, lured into believing he had been in control. Underestimating an opponent was something he should never do. He withdrew a folding knife and opened the blade. Not much use against a gun, but it was better than nothing at all.
He heard her approaching footsteps.
‘You’re out,’ she called. ‘I saw the bare metal of the gun barrel. The slide was back. You would have reloaded if you could.’
He didn’t respond. He concentrated on plotting his escape route and the odds of her hitting a fast-moving target in the dark with an inaccurate backup weapon.
Then he dismissed running for it because he heard the scrape of metal as she retrieved her primary weapon from the floor. She may be low on rounds but all she would need was a single burst.
‘You’re lucky that cab went by when it did,’ the assassin said. ‘Otherwise you would have taken a seven-six-two in the back.’
Victor said, ‘There’s no such thing as luck.’
‘Regardless, you’re out of it,’ she said. ‘Now, we’re going to switch roles. You’re going to answer my questions.’
Victor was a little surprised because he thought she only wanted to kill him. If she wanted to interrogate him, that gave him options.
‘So let’s go grab a coffee and talk. I could use an espresso.’
She laughed. It echoed. ‘It’s a bit late for caffeine. Besides, I don’t think I want to date you.’
‘Your loss,’ he said. ‘I’m a riot.’
‘I like that you can keep your sense of humour at a time like this, but I’m afraid to say it’s not going to change the fact that I’m the only one who will be walking out of here.’
He heard the sound of metal on metal as she reloaded her primary weapon, followed by her approaching footsteps. He pictured her sidestepping to get a line of sight because those footsteps scraped a little. It was no surprise that she was keeping her distance and wouldn’t round the corner close enough for him to attack. She had already proved herself a good operator. Better than him so far, because she had two guns and he had none.
But then he saw he didn’t need one, because for her to get a line of sight on him she would have to pass by the taped-off piles of building waste.
He rolled the knife around in his palm so the blade was facing up and then darted forward, covering the short amount of open space and flicking out the blade, slici
ng through the thick tape with an upward motion.
He kept moving because he knew he had exposed himself and heard the dull whip-crack sound of a suppressed shot as he sprinted away.
The round punched a hole in a nearby wall, but no others followed it because without the tape to hold the pile of waste in place the weight of brick and concrete shifted and slipped and became an avalanche of collapsing material that fell into the assassin as she rushed to follow him.
He heard the echoing rumble of the collapse and her cry of surprise and alarm, but didn’t look back – he wasn’t going to be fooled by her play-acting twice – and dashed through the rest of the basement level. The collapsing building waste would only injure her at best, and might have done nothing more than distract her. He wasn’t going to risk investigating either way. She was still armed and he was not.
A kick knocked fire doors open.
It wasn’t often Victor thought himself fortunate to be alive, but cold night air hadn’t felt so good in a long time.
He ran out into the street and kept running.
ELEVEN
Prague was a low-rise city. From only five storeys up Victor felt on top of the world. The cold morning air reddened his cheeks and numbed his hands. A thin layer of snow covered the flat roof and coated the hardy potted plants that formed a roof garden.
Footprints and a cleared bench showed the chill didn’t keep office workers from using it in such weather. Between the benches, a plant-less pot showed fresh cigarette stubs. The garden occupied about a quarter of the roof space. A low barrier of metal tubing fenced off the rest of the roof. Victor placed his footsteps in or over those of previous visitors and stepped over the barrier to approach the roof’s south side. He shuffled his steps to distort the prints left in the unbroken snow.
Vents and boxy air-conditioning units stood in a cluster. He rounded them and moved with caution until he was in position. He peered over the waist-high parapet and down to the street below.
On the far side of the street was the gated entrance leading to the basement where he had been ambushed the night before.
You’re lucky that cab went by when it did, the assassin had taunted less than twelve hours before. Otherwise you would have taken a seven-six-two in the back.
She was referring to a 7.62 x 52 mm bullet: a high-velocity rifle round. A useful one for an urban environment because the rifles that shot it weren’t as long or as difficult to position and transport as those that fired larger rounds. He pictured her assembling it from component pieces taken out of a briefcase.
Somewhere out there Al-Waleed bin Saud was flying to his next destination on a charter jet according to a coded email from Muir. Caglayan had disappeared.
Muir wanted answers. She wanted to know what had happened and what Victor intended to do to rectify his mistake.
His mistake.
Victor had elected not to reply. He didn’t know what had happened. He had been set up and ambushed. It wasn’t the first time. It was doubtful it would be the last. And he wanted answers beyond those his employers were able – or willing – to provide.
He had no interest in fulfilling his obligation on Al-Waleed when someone had almost killed him. His priority was to stay alive first, and get paid second.
He squatted low, imagining the assassin doing similar, maybe steadying the rifle with a bipod resting on the parapet. He saw no indentations in the snow for the bipod feet for the same reason he saw no footprints on the roof.
It had snowed overnight.
Victor inched forward to correct the perspective of a woman behind a rifle. How long had she been up here, waiting? He could not be sure. He had not seen her prior to the attack in the basement while he had performed routine scans of the area, but as he had noted at the time he had not had the window for thorough reconnaissance. The message with the time and location of the meet had only arrived an hour beforehand, and Victor did not know where or how she had gained her intelligence.
It had required no prior preparation for Victor to gain access to the building and its roof. It was an office building with no security greater than a bored guy behind a desk. Victor had walked straight by and taken the elevator up to the top floor and followed the signs to the roof. She could have done the same, or booked an appointment with someone in the building to provide an excuse for her presence, or she could have pretended to be a cleaner, or paid a bribe, or gained entry through any manner of distractions or bluffs.
It had been cold last night, and the woman was slight and had not worn any winter clothing. Like him, she opted for agility over comfort.
Using his knuckles, he brushed aside snow in a circle around him. He did so with a light touch to remove only the top layer of new snow. Nothing.
He widened the circle. Cellophane crackled. He removed a glove and picked the cellophane out of the snow with the nails of his thumb and forefinger.
It was crumpled and torn from its original box shape: three inches long by two wide and half an inch in depth. He recognised the shape from his days as a smoker. Though he had never littered like this.
He searched through the snow around where he had taken the cellophane from but found nothing further.
The roof was a big place. He could not search through every inch of snow. Besides, the assassin could have tossed any stubs off the roof.
He remembered yesterday’s wind, fierce and cold, blowing south. He hadn’t paid sufficient attention to estimate the wind speed, but that’s where weather reports came in. He looked over the parapet. He stood and brought his right thumb and index to his lips. He inhaled and moved his hand away, extending his index finger and parting it from his thumb in a flicking motion. He pictured a cigarette tumbling through the air, veering to his right and falling under gravity’s pull, but the wind blowing it back. He pivoted as he watched the imaginary butt arch back over the parapet and on to the roof.
Victor found it lying beneath the top layer of snow, next to an air-conditioning unit.
He used his nails to retrieve it by the burnt end. It was moist but not wet because the temperature had not yet risen enough to cause the overnight snow to melt.
A trace of mauve lipstick smudged around the filter end.
In the darkness, he had not noticed the assassin wearing lipstick – he had been too focused on staying alive to take in such details – but there was about half an inch of tobacco above the filter. No smoker threw away so much unless they had to – say because they needed both hands to operate a rifle now their target had presented themselves. That would also explain why she had overlooked the stub blown back on to the roof. She had been distracted by thoughts of killing Victor.
He broke off the ash from the tip and smelt the unburned tobacco. He hadn’t smoked for a couple of years but at that moment was tempted to start again.
He pushed the thought from his mind, breathed in the scent one last time, and dropped the butt into a pocket of his new suit trousers.
A taxi took him across the city and two buses brought him back in a circuitous route. He walked the rest of the way to Wenceslas Square, seeing no sign of a female assassin stalking him. He didn’t know if she was still on his trail or if she had fled or was preparing to strike again. The only thing he knew for certain was that she was alive because no mortuary in the city had received a corpse crushed by falling building material.
The old tailor grinned when Victor returned to the low-ceilinged atelier and moved to greet him with a youthful deftness to his step.
‘You’ve changed your mind,’ the tailor began with a glimmer of hope in his eyes. ‘You’ve seen sense, finally, else have been reborn and resurrected into a man of taste. Yes?’
‘Not exactly,’ Victor answered.
The glimmer faded from the old tailor’s eyes. ‘You don’t want me to adjust your suit?’
Victor shook his head. ‘I assure you I’ll consider it if I could have your opinion on something.’
The tailor looked at him with suspicion. ‘T
hat sounds like a bribe to me.’
‘That’s because it is.’
‘Very well, let’s have it.’
‘You said before no two varieties of tobacco are the same. Was that hyperbole?’
‘It was not.’
Victor produced the cigarette stub. ‘Then can you tell me anything about this particular cigarette?’
He handed the stub to the tailor who first examined it in his palm, then held it beneath his nostrils to smell.
‘This is no ordinary cigarette,’ the tailor said. ‘This is a work of art. These are crafted with love and rolled by hand. Not some godless machine.’
The tailor squeezed some unburned tobacco into his palm, then pinched and rubbed it between his fingers and smelled his fingertips, one by one, before holding the butt under his nostrils.
‘This is a particularly good blend of tobacco, strong and sweet. An aftertaste of chocolate, I think. This is the Château Lafite of cigarettes. Hand-rolled from only the finest leaves, perfectly dried under only the hottest sun.’
Victor listened.
‘From the West Indies,’ the tailor said. ‘Almost certainly. Dominican, would be my guess.’
‘Guess?’
‘Please, child. They don’t come with a serial number.’
‘Don’t you need to light it?’ Victor asked.
‘You ask for my expert opinion and then question my methods?’
‘I’m sorry. Thank you for your time.’
The tailor made a small nod to accept the apology. ‘And your suit?’
‘Maybe the jacket can be brought in a little.’
Victor had never seen a man look so happy.
TWELVE
Janice Muir ran every day, either on a treadmill or the old-fashioned way. Sometimes she ran twice a day. She did so for health and sanity, not for a figure. She had always been thin. Her mother told her she would look better with a few more pounds on her and her mother might well be right, but Muir didn’t care. She had never been vain, never cared for fashion, and she was too old to start caring now. Her health came first, her work came second. There was no room for a third concern in her life. Guys didn’t seem to understand that.